Gender and Care with Young Children A Feminist Material Approach to Early Childhood Education Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education Series

This book is an exploration of how children, educators, and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. Drawing on a collaborative research study with early childhood educators and young children, the author examines what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality does to complicate conversations about gender and care. By employing a feminist material analysis of early childhood education, this book rethinks dominant Euro-Western individualist pedagogies in order to reposition them within a relationality framework. The analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood education and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations.

Part 1. Context stories

Chapter 1. Curiosities

Chapter 2. Pedagogical Narrations

Chapter 3. Matternig threads, knots and black holes

Part 2. Classroom stories

Chapter 4. Knotty Doll Tales

Chapter 5. Tangled Tales of Car(e)s

Part 3. Invitations

Chapter 6. Differently Curious, Differently Accountable

B. Denise Hodgins is the executive director of the Early Childhood Pedagogy Network in British Columbia, Canada, a founding member of the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory, and a member of the Common Worlds Research Collective. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, Canada.